David on Formosa

Last weekend I went to the Taiwan Bloggers BoF at Huashan Culture Park in Taipei. Michael Turton gave a presentation about English-language bloggers in Taiwan. You can read a summary of his presentation and see some photos from the event here. Scott Sommers, one of Taiwan’s first English-language bloggers, was also in attendance. He has written some of his thoughts about the event.

In another recent post on his blog Michael Turton pointed out an article at Global Voices Online about transport issues in Taiwan. This article is written in English, but includes quotes in Chinese from a number of Taiwanese bloggers translated into English. These links are one of the simplest ways to build connections. I know that some Taiwanese bloggers have linked to or translated some of the articles I have written.

My own efforts at forging links between the English-language and Chinese-language blogospheres have been limited, but I still consider it important. I have added links to Chinese-language blogs on my links page. I also met one of Taiwan’s top tech bloggers, Mr 6 and I partially translated and commented on the article he wrote about the meeting on his blog.

Interpolating from my site statistics, comments and e-mails I receive I know that Taiwanese people living in Taiwan make up a significant percentage of my blog’s readership. I also know some other readers have at least some degree of Chinese-language reading skills.

I lament the fact that my own Chinese-language skills are not yet good enough to write very much of interest in that language. Although I can read Chinese well enough to comprehend most things I still find the prospect of wading into a bunch of Chinese-language blogs and extracting the most useful and interesting posts a somewhat daunting task. Hopefully it will become easier in the future.

Finally, I just want to say that I welcome comments on my blog in Chinese or English. Where the comments in Chinese contain important information I will translate them into English to make sure everyone can read them.

我熱烈歡迎您的中文留言。如果我要跟大家分享您的留言我自己翻到英文。